Schools transition to new athletic schedules
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MARTIN COUNTY - Martin County schools in the Big South and Tomahawk-Valley conferences are going through changes as they move to the Bound system for athletic schedules.
Fairmont Activities Director Mat Mahoney said having an online schedule where people can see dates, times and locations for upcoming events has been very important.
"The online scheduling format has been extremely beneficial to parents, coaches, fans, officials, workers, everybody," he said.
Previously, OurSchool was the software both conferences used for their school scheduling. With OurSchool being bought out by Arbiter, Mahoney said discussions on what to do started last year.
"The plan was to go to Arbiter, and a lot of the athletic directors didn’t like it," he said. "We researched and found this system called Bound, and has been a system that is used in Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota. It’s very well used. It’s very well liked amongst other states."
In some areas of the Fairmont Schools website, Fairmont's Arbiter page can still be found and does have a schedule, but Mahoney said that was put in a while ago, and Bound will be their main place to find upcoming events moving forward.
"We feel that Bound is much more user-friendly for everybody," he said.
As for why Bound, Mahoney said there were multiple reasons, including that pricing would be similar to other services.
"It’s a one-stop shop for everything," he said. "We can do student activity registration, physicals, create programs out of it, pay officials and upload stats to Bound. There’s so many tools that we can use from Bound that we haven’t been able to use before. Maybe the best tool is there is now an app for Bound. You can get the app, and it’s right there on your phone."
Families will create accounts through Bound for their students, and information and fees will be submitted through that account. As this new system is rolled out for activities and there is that adjustment and learning period, Mahoney said patience will be the biggest thing.
"With this new system and platform that we’re doing, there’s going to be wrinkles and bugs we have to fix and work out," he said. "That’s what we’re going to do. If we just have a little patience, a little time, it’ll work itself out."
The hardest part on the school side, according to Mahoney, is just that there is so much change with using a new system.
"It’s been a slow training in a way," he said. "Started with me learning how to do all the activities and putting everything in so that people can see that. Our CER went into how to do all of the training to reserve rooms and facilities throughout the district. My secretary, Jane Gustafson, has gone in and done all of the student registration, the physical piece of it. It’s been different waves, and we’re learning as we go."
Granada-Huntley-East Chain Activities Director Erin Roiger said Bound will mainly be a scheduling website for them, and things like fees and physicals will go through the regular channels. With this new service, Roiger said a big thing she has noticed on her end is support when issues do arise.
"I sent a message about our football schedule not showing on my side or something, and somebody responded to me within 45 minutes," she said. "It was like a chat feature, and I could go back and forth with them."
As for getting the word out, Roiger said a big piece of it was their fall sports meeting on Tuesday, where Bound was laid out for all in attendance.
"We ran through a demonstration on how to find the schedules," she said. "We showed them how to find our schools, how to find our conference. Sometimes parents don’t even know what schools are in our conference, so I showed them where they could see all of that, and then some of the different features that are on each of our Bound pages."
Moving forward, Roiger said she would like to see some more features added to the Bound version GHEC uses, such as paying online for digital tickets or additional features to help student-athletes complete necessary forms and tasks independently.
For Fairmont, visit gobound.com/mn/schools/fairmont. For GHEC, visit gobound.com/mn/schools/ghechain.